“I think it’s actually the first example of using bad breath as a defense, although I’m sure that everybody has had a personal encounter of something similar,” says Ian Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany.

As a plant defense, nicotine works by poisoning a variety of creatures. But the plump, striped tobacco hornworm caterpillar (Manduca sexta) can repurpose the poison to generate “toxic halitosis,” Baldwin says.

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